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A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War. Edited by Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. 456. Index.
It has become commonplace when reviewing edited books to note that the quality of the chapters is uneven. Happily, I will not resort to saying this here, since all the chapters are excellent! This book reexamines twentieth-century Latin American history by focusing on key revolutionary and counterrevolutionary moments and movements across the region and the connections between them. The result is a stimulating discussion of the role that violence played in giving rise to revolutionary attempts to end injustice, how revolutionary movements conceptualized and employed violence to achieve their goals, and how counterrevolutionary forces ruthlessly unleashed violence to subdue and eliminate, literally and figuratively, revolutionaries and the possibility of revolutionary change.
The book had its beginning in a conference held at Yale University in 2003. It consists of an introductory chapter by Greg Grandin, ten empirically based chapters, two reflections, and a concluding essay by Gilbert Joseph. The final chapter is an interview Greg Grandin conducted with Arno...